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BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932) Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), Wild reservation in New…
BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932)
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
DISTOPIAN NOVEL because :warning:
lack of freedom
no personal identity
setting
: London
when
: A.F. 632 (2540)
where
: Hatching and Conditioning Centre
Bokanovsky's process
PHASES:
1- surgical operation: ovary is removed
2- ova kept in suitable substance
3- ova inspected for abnormalities and transferred to a porous receptacle
4- receptacle is immersed in liquid containing spermatozoa
5- fertilized ova put back in incubators
Human beings are generated and born artificially in conditioning centres
they are classified and selected according to the role they would have in the society
there is no place left for individual choice or fellings
no emotions are allowed and the idea of family or maternity is abolished
it's a process of human cloning applied to fertilized human eggs in vitro, causing them to split into identical genetic copies of the original.
everything is planned
aim
: producing thousands of nearly identical human embryos
third person omniscient narrator
irony (like in coscienza di Zeno)
flashback technique
social novel
Huxley compared the predictions he had made in his novel with subsequent developments in science and society = he realized that many of his prophecies were coming true sooner than he thought
title taken from "the Tempest" of Shakespeare: "Oh brave new world that has such people in it!"
ironic meaning: human beings have lost their humanity
Social classes: Alphas, Betas, Deltas, Gammas, Epsilons
Ten World Controllers
synthetic drug= SOMA, which is used to solve any problem
Stability of society = genetic manipulation
CHARACTERS:
1- Bernard Marx (Alpha plus class)= he is critical about the BNW so he is send into exile, a day he visited a Savage Reservation in North America and met John the Savage (and his mother Linda)
2- John is the son of the director, but he would be obscene because John was born naturally so he left them on the island
3- Linda is John's mother, she is a Betha minus and she really wants to come back to London because her son wants to see the brave new world
4- Mustapha Mond is the controller and discusses with John about civilization and happiness. The Savage defends the beautiness of literature and Shakespeare, while Mustapha Mond claims that every art is sacrified in order to mantain the stability and happiness
[Mustapha=happiness; John=freedom]
at first John is fascinated by the new world, than he is disgusted by the conformity and the fact that everyone uses soma (her mother dead because of an abuse fo it)
at the end he is a victim of scientific experiments and commits suicide
John's death symbolizes Huxley's deep pessimism as regards the future of Western civilization
Linkage:
criticism about the Western culture and civilization made also by Nietzsche, Francoforte's school, Le Bon, ecc...
rapid development of technology and science
MAIN THEMES:
the use of technology to control society (science and medicine used to control society) = link with biotechnologies
the effects of scientific progress on the individual with the consequent loss of freedom and creativity
the destruction of the importance of history (like in Nietzsche= all that comes from the past is negative
the danger of genetic manipulation
the notion of equality taken to extremes and turned into massified conformism to design a perfect society
the incompatibility of happiness and truth
the danger of an all-powerful state
prophetic book
predicted Nazi German's policy of
eugenics
(Holocaust)
human cloning and genetic manipulations of modern biology
dramatic end of John= development of the media
global village of McLuhan = uniform lifestyle throughout the world without language or cultural differences (the vlaues are dictated by the structure of the markets)
BIOGRAPHY
graduated in Oxford
he wants a dynamic life so he travels and write a lot
he lived also in Italy and India
he predicted the future as Orwell and Bradbury did
motto: Community. Identity. Stability
he understood the consequences of totalitarian regimes (and also nowadays the democracy is going to be cancelled)
Wild reservation in New Mexico= where people still live naturally